If I were choosing the ten best films of the 1990s (and here I go), my list would look something the one above (which, by the way, is no particular order). Actually, my list would look exactly like the one above, since this is what I managed to come up with (after much agonizing) when I was recently asked for my top ten by Cinémathèque Ontario, which was conducting a poll of some sixty film programmers from around the world. Such lists are, of course, arbitrary and impossible, and omissions are bound to be glaring and obvious. No Egoyan? No Makhmalbaf? No Lars von Trier? No Hou Hsiao-Hsien? And where, for God's sake, is Michael Tolkin´s The Rapture?? (My giddiest guilty pleasure of the decade but I was just too much of a scaredy-cat to include on my top ten list.) That said, all my selections are, I believe, extraordinary achievements, offering often visionary, frequently challenging, always enthralling cinema. Many are also emblematic or representative of important larger trends or bodies of work (Iranian cinema, say, or the renaissance in Chinese filmmaking, or a particular 90´s zeitgeist, or that whole American indie thing, etc. etc.) that might have yielded worthy alternative choices.

To ring in the New Year and the new decade (and to studiously ignore all the marketing hype that would have us believe that the new century and new millennium have somehow arrived a year early), we´ll be screening most of my top ten of the 1990s over the next several weeks. The lone exception is Bruno Dumont's remarkable L'Humanité, which was my favourite film of 1999, but which is not yet available; La Vie de Jésus(1997), Dumont's unsettling debut feature, will screen in its place. Enjoy. And happy 2000.

Jim Sinclair
Executive Director

A Taste of Cherry (Ta'ame-Gilas)
Iran 1997. Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Cast: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdol Hossain Begheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari

No less than four films by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami turned up amongst the top ten films of the 1990s in Cinemathèque Ontario's recent poll of world film programmers; it was A Taste of Cherry,the Palme d'Or co-winner at Cannes in 1997, which got our vote (it ranked behind Kiarostami's And Life Goes On, Through the Olive TreesandClose-upin the Ontario poll). A film of devastating power, rigour and beauty, it follows a middle-aged, middle-class man, quietly resolved to some desperate purpose, as he criss-crosses the rural outskirts of Tehran in his expensive SUV. He gives lifts to a series of strangers a Kurdish soldier, an Afghani seminarian, a Turkish taxidermist and then offers each a considerable sum of money if they will assist him in a terrible task. Homayoun Ershadi, also seen recently in Dariush Mehrjui'sThe Pear Tree,has the unsettling lead role. Kiarostami's celebrated poetic humanism is everywhere in evidence; his noted hall-of-mirrors formalism, the unique blurring of reality and fiction, documentary and drama, that distinguished his previous works, is here held in check until the film's astonishing, enigmatic finale. A Taste of Cherry is an unforgettable work. "Emotionally engrossing... filmed with the piercing intensity of a fable... one of the director's darkest and most personal movies" (Deborah Young, Variety). Colour, 35mm, in Farsi with English subtitles. 98 mins.

Friday, January 28 7:30 pm
Saturday, January 29 9:25 pm

Safe
USA 1995. Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Dean Norris, Julie Burgess

Has Todd Haynes's achievement in this remarkable film been fully appreciated? A work of startling formal control and unnerving detachment, Safe captured the zeitgeist (and malaise) of late-20th century urban North America with an eerie, austere precision. Juliana Moore is superb as affluent but afflicted Southern California housewife Carol, a woman "allergic to the 20th century" - hypersensitive, it seems, to the fumes, toxins, and chemical irritants we breathe in each and every second. What Carol's really allergic to, of course, is something else again. Bad cologne? Or the benumbing emotional sterility and intellectual vapidity of contemporary corporate/consumerist culture? Haynes renders Carol's predicament in stark, elegant compositions, making Antonioni-like use of long shots and dècor to convey her alienation. He then whisks her off to New Mexico for rehab at one of those New Agey healing centres, sketched with a satire so subtle and restrained that one is never quite sure what the film's stance really is. "[A] peculiar, daring new movie... the rhythm is hypnotic... Moore, in a nearly unplayable role, is amazingly vivid and touching; this is a heartbreaking portrait of a woman in full, panicked retreat from life" (Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker).Colour, 35mm. 118 mins.

Friday, February 18 9:30 pm
Sunday, February 20 7:15 pm

Fireworks (Hana-Bi)
Japan 1997. Director: Takeshi Kitano
Cast: Beat Takeshi, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima

"Kitano's Venice prize-winner mixes tenderness, violence and droll humour. A recently retired cop drifts towards a one-off crime, to help out a suicidal colleague crippled in a disastrous stake-out, and to take his terminally ill wife on one last trip around Japan. It's exceptionally assured, imaginative and idiosyncratic: the violence is sudden, brutal and almost all in the editing; the working of Kitano's own delightful paintings into the story is astonishingly resonant; the mise-en-scène as sharp and inventive as in Sonatine; and it's all held together by Beat Takeshi's unprecedentedly taciturn performance, which is crucial to the film's emotional punch. [Beat Takeshi is director Kitano's acting alias.] Fans of Melville, Keaton, Hawks and Peckinpah should be especially impressed, but anyone with a modicum of patience, an open mind and a little love in their heart will surely recognize it as a masterpiece" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). "A film, in the unlikely form of a violent crime thriller crossed with a domestic melodrama, that captures a sense of sublime transcendence not much felt since the golden age of Mizoguchi, Ozu and Naruse" (Dave Kehr, Film Comment). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 103 mins.

Friday, February 18 7:30 pm
Saturday, February 19 9:25 pm

Secrets and Lies
Great Britain 1995. Director: Mike Leigh
Cast: Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Phyllis Logan

Master of "the high comedy of low manners" (David Thomson), Mike Leigh is a sharp-eyed observer of ordinary life and a remarkable director of actors, known for the lengthy, rigorous prep work he does with his excellent ensemble casts. Secrets and Lies, a delectable, funny/sad dissection of family dysfunction and social class, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and received five Oscar nominations, and could stand as a summa of the Leigh method. When Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young London optometrist, sets out to find the mother who gave her up for adoption, the search leads her to the unlikely personage of boozy, working-class Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) - unlikely because Hortense in black, Cynthia is white, and, well, there must be some mistake, right? Poor Cynthia, it seems, has made more than a few mistakes in her time, and is already hapless single mom to an unforgiving adult daughter, an upwardly mobile son, and a brittle, snooty daughter-in-law. When she brings Hortense along to a family birthday party, the stage is set for a climactic series of confrontations and confessions that careen from high comedy to Bergmanesque psychodrama. Showcasing superb performances, often in demanding long-take scenes, and a touching generosity of spirit, Secrets and Lies is "spellbinding... a film of extraordinary emotional riches" (Geoff Andrew). Colour, 35mm. 141 mins.

Monday, February 7 9:00 pm
Wednesday, February 9 7:00 pm

Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet karkaavat)
Finland 1996. Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Cast: Kati Outinen, Kari Väänänen, Elina Salo

"Life is short and miserable so let's make the most of it." The droll, deadpan films of idiosyncratic ironist Aki Kaurismäki have put Finnish cinema on the map over the past decade; the delectable Drifting Clouds is one of the director's finest efforts, and was chosen as one of the top three films of the 1990s in Cinémathèque Ontario's recent poll of international programmers. Showcasing the dryly comic, marvellously minimalist mèlange of Bresson, Buñuel and Jarmusch that makes Kaurismäki one of cinema´s most gifted and off-beat humorists and the great generosity for ordinary and on-the-skids folk that marks him as one of its master humanists the film follows the downward spiral of Ilona, a restaurant hostess, and husband Lauri, a transit worker. When both suddenly lose their jobs, the poker-faced pair are left scouring the mean streets of Helsinki in a humiliating search for work, any work, and soon find themselves scraping the bottom of that proverbial barrel. Shot in bold primary colours (mostly blue) by Kaurismäki regular Timo Salminen, and described by the director as a cross between Bicycle Thieves and It's a Wonderful Life, "Drifting Clouds is classic Kaurismäki, a beautiful, melancholy work that all but restores humanism to contemporary cinema. Who but Kaurismäki could make a comedy about unemployment, and turn it into a soulful, transcendent statement about hope and survival?" (James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario). "Sublimely funny... Drifting Clouds mixes the deadpan wit of Buster Keaton with the melancholy of Robert Bresson" (Sight & Sound). Colour, 35mm, in Finnish with English subtitles. 96 mins.

Friday, January 28 9:25 pm
Saturday, January 29 7:30 pm

Mother and Son
Russia/Germany 1997. Director: Alexander Sokurov
Cast: Alexei Ananishnov, Gudrun Geyer

Russian director Alexander Sokurov has been hailed as the heir to Tarkovsky and the new master of transcendental filmmaking, and is responsible for some of the most astonishingly luminous, metaphysical, mystical, meditative, painterly and poetic cinema of recent years. His breathtaking Mother and Son stands as one of the most startling and singular achievement of the 1990s. A delicate, deliberate, daunting work of great emotional amplitude and visual purity, Mother and Son unfolds in an isolated country cabin, where a dying woman and her attentive adult son enact a final, familial pas-de-deux. Using precious little dialogue, Sokurov conjures up a unique twilit world of overwhelming melancholy and strange ethereal beauty, a world, which seems to capture the immanent. The meticulously designed score resonates with murmuring voices, ominous distant thunder, chirping birds; the transfixing visuals evoke the brooding landscapes of 19th-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich, while shimmering with hallucinatory, never-before seen distortion effects (including deliberately misused anamorphic lenses). "Sokurov proves himself to be the cinema's supreme landscape artist" (Phillip Lopate). "A searing work of art about a great act of love... Mother and Son is a feature-length Pietà (Mary Corliss, Film Comment). "Astonishing... Mother and Son evokes overwhelming solitude amid creation... Watching it is like watching the last sunset" (J.Hoberman, Village Voice). "Sokurov is what cinema can be at its greatest... Mother and Son is one of his most beautiful, most important films" (Susan Sontag). Colour, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 73 mins.

Wednesday, February 2 7:30 pm
Thursday, February 3 9:30 pm

The Thin Red Line
USA 1998. Director: Terrence Malick
Cast: Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, James Caviezel, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Elias Koteas

Sure, we admired the Omaha Beach opening segment of Saving Private Ryan, but c'mon, Spielberg's Oscar-winning WWII movie can't hold a friggin' flamethrower to The Thin Red Line. Terrence Malick's first feature in two decades is a work of ravishing, remarkable cinematic poetry - and a trenchant reminder of bygone days (remember the '70s?) when Hollywood occasionally let visionary filmmakers (and not just marketers and focus groups) make big pictures. Based on the novel by James Jones (filmed once before, by Andrew Marton in 1964), and featuring a mammoth cast of major names (all of whom must have leapt at the chance to work with the director of Badlands and Days of Heaven), Malick's haunting, dream-like film is set in the jungles of Guadalcanal in 1942, where a company of American soldiers is assigned the deadly task of taking a heavily-fortified hill held by the Japanese. Lyrical and languid, metaphysical and mesmerizing, it moves between a startling multiplicity of perspectives, allowing us to hear the thoughts and fears of a variety of characters as they reflect on the enormity and absurdity of the situation before them. A transcendent and triumphant work. "A kind of lyric epic poem... There has truly never been a film about modern war quite like this one" (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). "It is an extraordinary achievement to have made a big-budget war film that seems so utterly personal. For all the dissonant voices, the star cameos, the awesome cinematography, this is Malick's vision alone" (Geoffrey Macnab, Sight & Sound). Colour, 35mm. 170 mins.

Monday, February 21 7:30 pm
Wednesday, February 23 7:30 pm

Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
Canada 1993. Director: François Girard
Cast: Colm Feore

One of the most innovative and original Canadian features of the 1990s was this remarkable reinvention of film biography by director François Girard and co-writer Don McKellar, the creative team who would join forces again for 1998's much-honoured The Red Violin. Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould takes as its subject the provocative life and work of the late pianist who was one of Canada's national treasures. Girard and McKellar eschew both conventional drama and conventional documentary for a unique approach that delivers precisely what the title promises: 32 short films - dramatizations, interviews, experiments - about Gould. The 32-segment structure is modelled on Bach's Goldberg Variations, one of Gould's most celebrated recordings; only 31 of the 32 vignettes are new: the other, Spheres, is the 1969 Norman McLaren animated short scored by Gould. The film's fresh and felicitous method succeeds altogether wonderfully, illuminating and capturing the enigma of Gould's eccentric genius in a way that a more conventional approach surely could not. This is a beautifully shot, richly intelligent, inspiring, audacious work full of epiphanies and poignancy, and featuring a tour-de-force turn by Colm Feore in the central role. It won 1993 Genie Awards for Best Film, Director, Cinematography, and Editing. Colour, 35mm. 90 mins.

Monday, February 7 7:15 pm
Wednesday, February 9 9:35 pm

Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin)
Hong Kong 1994. Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Faye Wang

One of the decade's most dizzying and dazzling new talents was Hong Kong hipster and Quentin Tarantino favourite Wong Kar-Wai (Fallen Angels, Happy Together), a poignant post-modernist and exhilarating visual stylist whose wildly original gifts are on best display in this international cult hit, lately turning up on many a critic's 'Best of the 90s' list. Ultra-chic, ultra-urban, and ultra-urgent, Chungking Express unfolds in two loosely connected parts, both about lonely, lovelorn cops with serious women troubles. It was shot by Christopher Doyle, the phenomenally fluid Australian-born cinematographer who is a key contributor to the Wong aesthetic. Few recent films have been as frenetic or as ferociously entertaining, yet at the same time so strangely moving; Chungking Express demonstrates why each new Wong film "has been an important event in international cinema" (David Overbey, T.I.F.F.). "A quicksilver magical mystery tour... drenched in neo-'60s nostalgia" (Variety). "A movie that looks like a wholesale reinvention of the cinema, not to mention the zingiest visit to Heartbreak Hotel you ever saw. This is what Godard movies were once like: fast, hand-held, funny, and very, very catchy"(Tony Rayns). Colour, 35mm, in Cantonese with English and Chinese subtitles. 103 mins.

Wednesday, February 2 9:00 pm
Thursday, February 3 7:30 pm